How can scanning and imaging services help my business?

Whatever type of business your company handles, files can quickly build up, making a paper system bulky, cumbersome, and prone to disorganization. These days, digital files are the clear answer, as they streamline organization, while freeing up office space and saving precious time for everyone involved. Check out these ways scanning and imaging services can benefit your business when handled by a professional records management company. 

Convert hard copies to digital archives

Nearly all businesses these days are working their way to a fully digital archive system. In the healthcare field especially, medical offices are more and more relying solely on electronic medical records (EMRs). The conversion offers a variety of benefits for any business, streamlining organization and ensure information security. However, the process can be slow and difficult, particularly for businesses with years of stockpiled records.

Outsourcing the task of scanning your records into digital copies to a reliable data management company makes it so your business can move forward with a digital archive system quickly and efficiently while following best industry practices. With professional scanning and imaging services, your office can have a digital filing system up in no time, without the busy work of scanning each individual document yourself.

Stop bogging down internal systems

One of the most significant ways scanning and imaging services can help out your business is by freeing up physical space around the office, as well as the mental space of your employees. 

Trying to maintain a paper-based filing system will leave your office endlessly disorganized and cramped, as important documents continue to pile up. Not only will you always be looking for more space and a better organization system, but you’ll be putting confidential client information at risk. Meanwhile, your employees remain distracted by proper filing practices and the threat of potential security breaches.

Scanning and imaging services are the key to reducing these stressors around the office, as the conversion of paper documents to online records leaves the office feeling more open, organized, and efficient, while allowing employees to do their best work, focused on their own responsibilities.

Optimize filings for sorting and indexing 

Tracking down a specific file in a mess of paper records can be a nightmare, especially for businesses with years of backlog. With so many records to go through and constantly changing organization systems, recovering documents amounts to a huge waste of time in the office. 

Converting these hard copy documents to a digital system through scanning and imaging services leaves your office with a streamlined document filing system. Records stay neat, organized, and easily accessible, as any record can be tracked down in minutes. As an added bonus, digital file systems also benefit from the use of optical character recognition (OCR). With OCR, not only can the digital database be searched for a specific document, but any scanned document or photo can also be searched for specific words or phrases. 

Create a digital archive backup system for your paper records

Digital archives are good for more than just replacing your old hard copy filing system. Through scanning and imaging services, they also offer a secure and convenient backup solution in case of an emergency. With the ever-present risk of a flood or a fire compromising important records, a digital archive system in addition to your hard copy files can give you and your clients peace of mind, knowing any record can be recovered, even in the event of a disaster. These days, security specialists recommend having a layered backup system, involving your on-site servers, an off-site, cloud-based system, and a third off-site, offline location, an option Augusta Data Storage offers.

Keep potential audits or legal cases simple

Should your business become involved in an audit or legal case, you’ll need fast access to a large volume of records, in order to help things run smoothly, without impeding the investigation. Rifling through a paper filing system would require all hands on deck, taking valuable time and energy away from client services. Developing a digital database of records using scanning and imaging services makes it easy to find any records an auditor requests fast with a neatly organized system of searchable documents. 

Need information, but don’t know where to find it? Rather than having to carefully read each record, OCR capabilities make it so that even scanned documents and photos can be searched for words or phrases, making it easy to quickly find what you’re looking for. If the records you need to comb for information only exist in a paper format, our scanning services offer quick file conversion, so that these files are just as easy to sort and search using OCR. 

Ways Augusta Data Storage Can Help 

Whichever benefit meets your business’s needs, Augusta Data Storage provides a variety of services to help your office make the switch to an easier and more efficient digital document management system. Our years of experience and best industry practices can efficiently expedite digital imaging processes, so your business is reaping the benefits of your new system in no time. 

Scanning

Augusta Data Storage offers both digital scanning and archiving technologies. With these services, your business will always have quick and easy access to records without sacrificing any security. Allow our team to transfer your records to digital files using our bulk scanning service, able to carefully handle a variety of project sizes, no matter how far into the past your records stretch back. Our scanning services are efficient, quickly creating a digital archive compatible with your chosen records management processes, so that information can be located and accessed in a flash. As a bonus, Augusta Data Storage also offers wide-format scanning solutions for large documents like blueprints and technical drawings that produce high-resolution digital images of your items, after which the originals will be returned to you. 

File conversion

The file conversion process at Augusta Data Storage makes safekeeping files through additional digital storage a no-brainer. Regardless of the number of records your business provides, we can convert each backfile into a digital version, able to be archived on internal systems or in the cloud for safe and permanent access, leaving your office with a system of digital archives, easy to organize and maintain. While your employees get back to their main responsibilities, Augusta Data Storage will handle:

• Document pickup and delivery
• File organization and prep
• Document scanning
• File indexing
• Optical character recognition (OCR)
• Image database management
• Documents archived on hard drive or other media backup devices
• Storage for your original paper records
• Climate controlled storage for backups of your electronic media
• Purge destruction of original paper documents

OCR capabilities

Businesses looking to scan their paper documents can simultaneously benefit from our OCR services, in which scanned and digitized records of any kind, including pictures, can be easily searched for information, just as you would a word document or a web page. OCR significantly improves the speed and accuracy of data entry, while also offering editing capabilities, meaning revisions can be made to any archived document, including:

• Invoices
• Tax and financial records
• Legal filings
• Business records
• Personnel files
• Client records
• Patient records
• Contracts and proposals
• And more

No matter how long your business has been in operation, scanning and imaging services from a professional data management company can make the transition into a paperless system easy. Contact one of our account managers today to learn more about the tools we have developed to help you manage your Records Information Management processes.